The use of renewable forms of energy is currently enjoying unprecedented activity due to various globally accepted environmental concerns. However in order to make a significant impact on global energy consumption, the scale of deployment of renewable energy projects will require enormous increases.
While the more well established forms of renewable energy, namely the harnessing of wind and solar energy, have reached a commercial level of deployment, the more recent exploration of tidal energy is a relatively new field of endeavour. As with any new technologies, it is necessary to move through proof of concept, through small scale and then full scale prototype testing before commercial levels of deployment can be achieved. In addition the cost and complexity of these new technologies must be reduced in order to render the technology commercially viable. The extraction of energy from tidal flows is a particularly problematic area, as the technology is deployed at sea, adding a further layer of complexity to the deployment process. Significant levels of heavy engineering are therefore required in order to achieve the desired results. It is therefore desirable to reduce the cost and complexity of this phase of the deployment process.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to address the above mentioned problem.